Table of Contents

This study was originally processed, archived, and disseminated by Data Sharing for Demographic Research (DSDR), a project funded by the
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Study (DNORPS) (ICPSR 29523)

Principal Investigator(s):Sastry, Narayan, University of Michigan, and RAND Corporation

Summary:

The Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Study was designed to examine the current location, well-being, and plans of people who lived in the city of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005. The study is based on a representative sample of pre-Katrina dwellings in New Orleans. Fieldwork focused on tracking respondents wherever they currently resided, including back to New Orleans. Respondents were administered a short paper-and-pencil interview by mail, by telephone, or in person. The pilot study was fielded in the fall of... (more info)

The Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Study was designed to examine the current location, well-being, and plans of people who lived in the city of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005. The study is based on a representative sample of pre-Katrina dwellings in New Orleans. Fieldwork focused on tracking respondents wherever they currently resided, including back to New Orleans. Respondents were administered a short paper-and-pencil interview by mail, by telephone, or in person. The pilot study was fielded in the fall of 2006, approximately one year after Hurricane Katrina. The goal of DNORPS was to assess the feasibility of the study design and thereby to lay the groundwork for launching a major longitudinal study of displaced New Orleans residents.

ICPSR only holds the public data for the pilot study. The main study (DNORS) was carried out 2009-2010. These data are not yet publicly available, but for more information, visit the RAND Corporation website.

Access Notes

The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public.
Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

Universe:
The universe for the sample is the city of New Orleans, defined as the Orleans Parish.

Data Types:
survey data

Methodology

Study Purpose:
The goal of this study was to determine the feasibility, best practices, and expected costs of conducting a long-term study of the demographic, social, economic, and health effects of Hurricane Katrina on the population of New Orleans.

Study Design:
Starting with a sample of 344 housing units selected from the period pre-Katrina, the project team used a multi-mode approach to locate and interview an individual from each sampled housing unit. The protocol called for sending every sampled household a letter and questionnaire, while concurrently sending the sample through multiple batch tracing and intensive tracing searches to attempt to assign a name and telephone number to each sampled unit.

Sample:
The universe for the sample is the city of New Orleans, defined as the Orleans Parish. Two block data files were merged together to produce a file that contained flood depth level on August 31, 2005, measured in feet. Three levels based on the flood level information were created for each block. The code is the average level of flooding and is collapsed into the following three categories: Low (0 feet), Medium (1-3 feet), High (4 or more feet). Given the higher cost and lower probability of success of tracing in the High stratum, these areas were undersampled and correspondingly the Low stratum areas were oversampled. A sample of 950 addresses was selected using the above allocation for the three strata.

Weight:
Household-level design weights were created as the inverse probability of selection for each mailing address or household. This weight was used to create a person-level design weight. In most situations, the person-level and the household-level design weight are the same because a census was taken of all persons in households with up to five people. Person-level design weights were inflated for households that had more than five persons. This was done by inflating the weight of persons with survey data. For example, given a household with 7 eligible persons and a household design weight of 500, the person-level weight becomes 500*(7/5)=700. The final analysis weight was created using the person-level design weight which was post-stratified by Stratum, Gender, Age and Race to the 2000 United States Census figures for Orleans Parish. Post-stratification was done using non-linear optimization to minimize the overall unequal weighting effect and achieve the 2000 Census totals at the margins of Gender, Age and Race within strata.

Response Rates:
The overall, unweighted, unadjusted response rate was 45.0 percent. A full discussion of response rates is provided in the study documentation

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: